The Internet has changed the way people gather information, establish relationships with one another and even how people communicate with one another. Additionally, the Internet has changed the way companies seek potential customers and even what the meaning of a business is. It has changed the way companies advertise, sell, coordinate with one another and compete with one another. With this change has come a huge explosion in the number of Webpages for people to visit. Search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others have come into being to help people find their way to Webpages that they desire. As a result, the number and types of channels that a marketer can leverage has also exploded—beyond organic and paid search, they can also leverage blogs, social media, video sharing, mobile content and ads, display ads, and many other channels.
Search engine optimization (SEO) has emerged as a means for collecting, storing, and analyzing search engine data using computing systems in order to provide meaningful recommendations to visibility or to report on the effectiveness of a website or a webpage in search engines. As such, SEO is implemented by Internet Technology (IT) professionals to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a given webpage or Internet site. Typical techniques used in SEO include collecting, tracking, or analyzing specific metrics which led a user from various channels to a particular site. These channels may include search engines, emails which include links to the website, other websites which include links or references to the particular site, including social media sites, advertisements, blogs, tweets, or the like. The metrics that may be tracked include keywords inputted into the search engine, keywords or other data obtained from parsing the source, or the like.
Recently, various websites including search engines and various social media websites have begun implementing increased privacy measures which shield or restrict the amount of data that is available to entities using traditional SEO. For example, rather than reporting what specific keywords were used in a search which resulted in a visit to a website, a search engine may only report that a search was performed without reporting which keywords were used in the search.
Without the reporting data on how those visitors using secured search or other channel using restricted reporting mechanisms arrived at the website, entities are unable to accurately track details concerning the reference that drove the visitor to come to the webpage and may be left with an incomplete evaluation of their webpage's performance from the external source. In particular, without directly crawling and analyzing the page where the visitor came from, there is a very inaccurate view into how the visitor got to a webpage, what was the entities performance in those external sources, and how a marketer should optimize their online marketing campaigns.
However, the ability to quantify the and track the various channels that brought visitors to a Webpage, along with the ability to correlate those channels to the visitors' actions once there, may have a significant impact on the success of the Webpage. For example, many Webpages rely on tracking a specific to bring in advertising revenue to sustain the Webpage or supplement the revenue that the Webpage brings in. Therefore, accurately determining specific channels that result in visitors, the ability to correlate those channels with the behavior of the visitors will help the marketer to focus on and optimize campaigns to bring additional revenue.
Additionally, tracking the behavior of the actions of each visitor would allow the Webpage to be marketed more efficiently. Without understanding key attributes of their performance on the search engine, they cannot accurately determine the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Moreover, they cannot determine how their organic search marketing efforts would impact what those visitors do on the Webpage when they have found the Webpage. For example, if a Webpage is selling merchandise, there is currently no way to determine who completed a particular purchase on the Webpage and compare that with how that visitor came to the Webpage.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one exemplary technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.